Long Versus Short Term - Important Versus Urgent
So we have gone and exposed ourselves this week. Check out
http://bit.ly/nU2ugH.
When we were approached to do the article we thought long and hard about the best topic to cover, lord knows that we always have plenty of ‘wicked problems’ to deal with; wicked problem being a term used by Roger Martin in Design Thinking [
http://rogerlmartin.com/devotions/design-thinking]. He has written a great book "The Design of Business" on the subject which we use internally as a framework for how we operate as an organization.
We decided to go with the ‘long term versus short term planning’ as this is one that we’ve been discussing internally a lot recently and we thought would be interesting to get feedback on from experts in the outside world.
The balance between long term and short term, the separation of the important from the urgent, is an extremely difficult balance to strike. You can spend an infinite amount of time pondering the ifs, buts and maybes of where you need to be three years down then suddenly that can seem like wasted effort when the world changes, as happened with the financial crisis, and you have to start again with the new world as your context.
Over the years we’ve tended to see a pendulum effect where we go from being long term focused to being short term focused, we’re trying to keep the swings shorter but they still happen.
The advice we received was all good advice, some of which we already have in place, the experts suggested an advisory board. We’ve had an advisory board from the beginning and this was essential to us in the early days, although we don’t leverage it enough these days (too busy? but still not good).
We have annual offsite meetings, usually around October, and have external facilitation and trusted business advisors involved, although ironically the last one focused on short term issues.
We have successfully outsourced a range of functions, although HR outsourcing is one that we’ve never got to grips with (not enough time?).
So I guess that we’re on the right track overall, there’s always more we can do but we seen to have many of the fundamentals in place.
Just want to thank the folks at the Globe and Mail for asking us to be involved, the experts who gave their opinions and the ‘friends of LOGiQ
3’ who have been very supportive and sent some nice emails to us since they saw the article.
Last thing we do want to put straight from the article is the line ‘…But they’re doing most of the consulting work themselves’….this is not strictly true, and we’ve taken some abuse for this one :-).
We do rely very heavily on the team around us and it would be completely impossible to do the work on our own.
Enjoy the long weekend, and hope that Summer 2011 was good for you.
Cheers,
Simon